Risdon Slate knows first hand what can happen when a law-abiding man suffering a mental episode gets handcuffed for behaving strangely in public. He knows this because it happened to him. What he endured in that jail cell–locked up during a manic episode that befuddled police–has fueled Slate’s long campaign to lessen the chances that others with mental illness will needlessly wind up behind bars.

“At no point—not when I was arrested, not when I was booked into the jail, not when I stood before that judge—did anyone see that my problem had nothing to do with me being a criminal,” says the 57-year old, who heads up Florida Southern College’s criminology department. “I wasn’t a criminal. No one paid any attention to what was really wrong with me.”

Slate’s one-and-only arrest happened when he was 34. The police were called after he was discovered marching around a makeshift fortress of books that he built in the parking lot of a South Carolina apartment complex. When Slate’s wife told the officers that Slate has bipolar disorder, they let him off with a warning. The warning didn’t take: the next day, Slate–off his meds–was arrested. He had just dived naked into the apartment complex’s pool.

I wasn’t a criminal. No one paid any attention to what was really wrong with me.

After that run-in with the law, Slate got back on lithium, which helps control his disease to this day. But in a very real way, that incident continues to be a driving force in his life. His tours around the country to train members of the criminal justice system to have a more nuanced view of mental illness.

Right now, the nation’s prisons house more mentally ill people than psychiatric hospitals. That’s partly because many police officers don’t know what to do with a person experiencing a mental episode. Slate advocates a more informed and humane approach, where the mentally ill–particularly those who are nonviolent–are locked up as the last resort, not the first.

Slate poses with some of his “students.” Photo: Jamaica Gillmer

Being open about his own mental illness is central to Slate’s work. Yet, the fact that he is on lithium surprises some of the law-enforcement officials he trains; he doesn’t “look” mentally ill, they’ll say. But Slate is quick to point out that mentally ill people don’t usually appear out-of-place unless they are having a crisis: for example, because they have gone off their meds, or their medication has otherwise stopped working.

In other words, just because a person in crisis is acting strangely doesn’t mean they are a de facto criminal.

“I let officers know they may be the one person that an individual, particularly if it’s their first psychotic break, can look to and hear someone say, ‘There is hope for you. You can make something positive out of this,'” Slate says. “They can be that crucial individual that can get the person to a place where they get medical help, recover, and become productive citizens.”

Just because a person in crisis is acting strangely doesn’t mean they are a de facto criminal.

Slate’s own arrest was triggered by such a crisis.

When he was a 34-year-old parole officer, a new psychiatrist took Slate off the lithium he’d been on for several years. Slate didn’t have bipolar disorder, the psychiatrist argued. Instead, he was merely stressed.

But stopping Slate’s meds cold-turkey had some quick and furious effects. At a South Carolina college’s football game, Slate began hallucinating. On the field, players morphed into kings and knights on a chessboard right before his eyes. By the game’s third quarter, Slate was in full-tilt manic mode. Worried, his wife led him to the stadium parking lot, where she called EMTs: her husband was having an episode.

When they arrived, Slate–fast-tongued and persuasive–countered: his wife was the one in distress, not him. They checked her soaring blood pressure–understandable, Slate says, under the circumstances–and sent the couple on their way.

When he got back to their apartment complex, Slate immediately began building his parking-lot fortress of books. He was arrested the next day.

“Those police back in South Carolina? If they’d had better training, they could have diverted me from lock-up.'” Photo: Jamaica Gillmer

“The rest is history,” Slate says. “This is my spin on it: Getting arrested was God’s way of saying to me, ‘You’ve got to come out of closet about your mental illness. Maybe, that will be your way to help others.’”

He helps himself by rigorously following his regimen of prescribed meds and overall self-care. Being open about his mental illness and how he treats it shows other mentally ill people how they, too, can thrive. It also bolsters his mission to help foster a criminal justice system whose dealings with the mentally ill are understanding and compassionate. Slate’s core expertise and beliefs landed him on the National Alliance of Mental Illness’ board of directors for several years. He was called as an expert witness during the September 2000 congressional hearings on mental health, which, in turn, resulted in funding for the nation’s first mental health treatment courts.

The most recent data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics suggests that a quarter of those in prison or awaiting trial are mentally ill. Slate believes that number will decrease if police have proper training in mental health issues, as well as access to community-based mental health programs.

“Those police back in South Carolina? If they’d had better training, they could have diverted me from lock-up. They could have told people at the jail that I was mentally ill,” Slate says. Luckily, though, things are getting better. “These days, there are [jails whose intake papers] have a little block to check off: ‘Does this person have signs of mental illness?’ People running things know they need to take a different tack.”

You’ve got to come out of closet about your mental illness. Maybe, that will be your way to help others.

Which isn’t to say some correctional facilities aren’t doing a good job. A handful of states have made major strides on this front, Slate says. But even the best available treatment won’t work if cops don’t know what to look for.

“There are some beautiful, perfect models of what to do out there,” he says. “But they’re perfect models for an imperfect world. That’s one of the reasons this training is so key. But, again, if you don’t have treatment to link people with mental illness to, that model isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on.”

The need for stronger methods of dealing with the mentally ill within the criminal justice system is what compels Slate to continue his work. “Ever since coming out of the closet [as mentally ill], my mission has been to prevent others with mental illness from coming into contact with the criminal justice system,” says Slate.

And if they have to come into contact with that system? Slate hopes he’s made it friendlier to the mentally ill than it was when he got arrested during his own mental breakdown. During an episode, the mentally ill who commit crimes often are totally unaware of what they’re doing. But that doesn’t necessarily make them criminals, Slate says. The criminal justice system should exist to protect victims of all stripes… including those who are the victims of their own minds turning against them.

https://folks.pillpack.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/IMG_4936C-1024x683-1.jpg6831024Katti Grayhttps://folks.pillpack.com/wpinhere/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/folks-logo-1.pngKatti Gray2018-03-08 07:30:152018-03-08 10:50:26The Criminologist Who Came Out Of The Closet As Mentally Ill

Kathy was my best friend. Bozling, she said, communicated with her telepathically. One fall night, the leaves still magenta under the stars, she said, crying: “Here’s a tear because Bozling’s not here.” Bozling said, through Kathy, that he had the ability to see our past lives, or akashic records, which are a compendium of everything that has ever happened or will happen on earth. Apparently, in past lives, I’d been a gypsy, a water carrier, and a poet.

It was the late 1970s, the days of Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders From Mars. Bowie was more than just a rock musician: he was our high priest, and we dressed accordingly. I had a platinum buzz cut and wore silver platform shoes along with men’s neckties and suits. Kathy draped herself in long silk scarves, and painted the moon and the stars in acrylics and glitter on her jeans. We were 16, and perfectly matched.

Kathy didn’t seem sick then. I thought she was plugged in to a higher realm.

I liked the idea, metaphorically, of an interplanetary being. The whole star man ethos was definitely in the air for us. I was reading Edgar Cayce, the American mystic, at the time, and my boyfriend was practicing to see if he could astral project in his sleep at night. I wrote poetry about Bozling, and Kathy sketched pictures of him; a spaceman with antenna, alone, on a cold planet, not unlike the hero in Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince.

The whole star man ethos was definitely in the air for us.

Bozling said many of the same things as Cayce: that we have many lives and many masters, that some of us were reincarnated from the lost city of Atlantis. It was around this time that her appearance started to change. She lost weight. Her olive skin grew pale. Her eyes seemed to get bigger. Her make-up, once meticulous, became more outlandish; yellow and pink eye shadow, smudged dark lips. Before she reminded me of an Egyptian princess, now she started to look like a ghost.

Initially, I didn’t pathologize any of Kathy’s new behaviors: not the change in her appearance, her new found psychic ability, or even her interplanetary friend. It never occurred to me that she was sick, that these were classic symptoms of schizophrenia. We’d certainly been chasing transcendence in many other forms including LSD, so the idea she might’ve found it, another way of being, another way of thinking… honestly, I was jealous.

But even if I didn’t think there was anything wrong with her, other people did. Her mother was a registered nurse who’d regularly pull me aside and say: “Kathy’s mentally ill… Why her and not you? You both did drugs” And our friends would say: “She’s so far out there, she’s never coming back”.

In The Inward Journey, Joseph Campbell writes that: “a schizophrenic breakdown is an inward and backward journey… [the person with schizophrenia] has tipped over and is sinking, perhaps drowning…and his long deep dive to the bottom of the cosmic sea to pluck the watercress of immortality, there is one green value of his life down there. Don’t cut him off from it. Help him through.” This is, in fact, what other cultures do. Olga Khazan, writing for The Atlantic says that Eastern and African cultures tend to emphasize relationships and collectivism. There, a hallucination was more likely to be seen as just another point in the schizophrenic person’s already extensive social network.

But Kathy didn’t live in Asia or Africa. She had schizophrenia and lived in America, where she was isolated for it. Nobody else saw the poetry, the imagination, or the possibility of interstellar travel; they saw insanity.

She had schizophrenia and lived in America, where she was isolated for it.

Two years later, and her symptoms worsened. I graduated from high school, but she didn’t. One night, our friend Sam, who owned a local nightclub, took Kathy and I out to dinner at an Italian restaurant. It was famous in our hometown, and Sam knew everyone. Sam and I got pasta, but wraith-like Kathy only ordered a shot of whiskey. When our meals were served, she drained the glass, and then threw up in it; silently and casually. Sam looked down at his plate, swimming in cheese and tomato sauce and said: “I can’t finish this meal.”

After we drove her home, Sam told me: “I can’t do this anymore.” I’d been her apologist for so long, but I couldn’t argue. I was exhausted. I respected her visions, but in the face of so much scorn and fear, she really started to slip away. And it didn’t help that throwing up in a shot glass became a routine for her. I don’t know if she did it to shock people, or if she was genuinely nauseous, and I never asked. She did it again, the second time, at Sammy’s bar. After that, it became regular. Everyone avoided her.

Her parents chastised her. I think they had this idea that if she would stop doing drugs, everything would return to normal. And in our close knit Russian and Polish immigrant community on the banks of Lake Michigan, we all tried to hide what went on behind closed doors. Her parents didn’t bring her to see a doctor. Shame kept them from helping her. Shame kept Kathy trapped, alone and isolated.

The U.S. National Library of Medicine reports that the 1970s “was a decade of increasing refinement and specificity of existing treatments for schizophrenia. There was increasing focus on the negative effects of various treatments, such as deinstitutionalization, and a stronger scientific basis for some treatments emerged. For instance, the field of somatic treatments saw a greater and more sophisticated use of lithium.”

I was 19 when I left town, the same time when the lithium landed. Kathy was still a wraith, out of step with the world, but now she was sedated; the cord cut between her and her starman in the sky. Now she, not Bozling, was the alien on a cold planet.

Kathy was still a wraith, out of step with the world, but now she was sedated; the cord cut between her and her starman in the sky.

Cecilia McGough, an astronomy and astrophysics major at Penn State, and Virginia Aerospace science and technology scholar, recently gave a TED Talk about her schizophrenia. She makes the point that this illness is unique to each person; what is true for one person with schizophrenia may not be true for another. The disorder is a constellation of symptoms. She is hesitant, she admits in her TED Talk, to tell other people about her hallucinations because “people usually look at me in fear after I tell them what I see.” She defines her schizophrenia “as someone who cannot turn off her nightmares even when she is awake,” and refuses to acknowledge her hallucinations, even though her own personal Bozling–a Pennywise-like clown that only she can see–was in the audience for the TED talk that day.

I can’t help but wonder about how McGough has managed to accomplish so much, when Kathy struggled so profoundly. Perhaps it’s the meds; the drugs they diagnose people with today for schizophrenia are far less debilitating than the lithium that was used to sedate Kathy. Or maybe it’s McGough’s extensive social network, which “helps her through” her visions.. Perhaps together, this modern collectivism, along with better meds, have allowed her to move through this world in a way that Kathy, born in the wrong place and time, could not.

Kathy ended up alone.

Our tribe, before we left Kathy behind.

After Bozling was banished to the coldest, darkest parts of the cosmos, I heard, through friends, that she spent much of her time at a bar near the railroad tracks, throwing down whiskey shots until eight in the morning. One day, a few years after I moved to New York City, I went to visit her; she still lived at her parent’s house, where her family kept her hidden as much as possible. When I went into her room, she was playing Low by David Bowie. I was shocked by her appearance. She didn’t even look like the same person anymore; the lithium had changed the contours of her once striking profile. My olive skinned gypsy girl with the aquiline nose was gone, replaced by someone pale and hollowed.

Somewhere along the way, we had all failed her. It was partly the shame of our immigrant community where everybody knew everyone else’s business, or thought they did. It was also a time in the culture when mentally ill teenaged girls were hidden from the rest of the world; a mid-century version of the madwomen in the attic. Unlike McGough, she didn’t have a community who would try to understand the unique wiring of her brain.

Even I, her greatest advocate, couldn’t be exonerated from leaving her behind. In my last days in town, she had frightened me. I didn’t think she was tapped into a greater reality anymore. I saw how sick she had become. I wish I’d taken the time to speak candidly with her mother. I think we both hoped that the girl we once loved would spontaneously reappear. Neither of us ever said schizophrenia. As Campbell suggests, there wasn’t anyone to help her through: simply by listening, not judging. That was my role, but I had abandoned it.

About 15 years later, I went back to my hometown for my grandmother’s funeral. Taking a break from the service, I went outside and smoked a cigarette on a bench, when a middle aged woman with a bad perm sat down next to me. I thought she was a relative. She didn’t say a word, just smoked in silence. Later, my sister said, Kathy saw you at grandma’s funeral. Why didn’t you say hi?

And then I knew: the woman sitting next to me was Kathy. Of course she looked like a relative. I’d once loved her so much.

The first time I realized my dad wasn’t like other dads, he sat straight up in bed, wide-eyed, and started screaming: “WHO ARE YOU? WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE?”

I would later become a smart aleck, but at the time, I was three, maybe four, so I didn’t respond to these questions the way I might now: “Hey, if anyone should know, it’s you.”

Besides, my father wasn’t joking. As he shook me by the shoulders, his eyes rolled white in his head, like the eyes of a terrified animal.

A moment before, I had been watching Sesame Street on the edge of my parents’ bed. My father was napping. He’d been sick for the last couple of days, so he’d stayed home from the office that day. It must have been late, because my mother, who also worked, was home. I think it was spring or summer, because it was still daylight out.

Or maybe it was a weekend in winter. How can you totally trust a 35-year-old memory? All I know is that when I remember that day, it happens in the evening. In the springtime. And my father is still there, still alive, shaking me by my tiny shoulders and yelling.

The reedy tremolo of terror in her voice gives my father, deranged, another vector than the small, shivering child he was shaking in his hands. (Did he know I was a child, let alone his child? Was he that far gone? Another answer I’ll never know.) He erupts from the bed, hurling me into the corner, and by the time I have picked myself up from the floor, the bedroom is empty.

I follow him into the hallway, sniffling. I feel the overwhelming guilt of the toddler, whose heart crushes itself under the solipsism of his newness. Whatever is wrong with my dad, I must be the cause. Yet I have no real idea of what it is I could have done.

Whatever is wrong with my Dad, I must be the cause. Yet I have no real idea of what it is I could have done.

He’s in the hallway now. Sun slants between the bannisters, painting dazzle camouflage against the staircase wall. He strides down it, something primal, senselessly screaming. My mother, also screaming, tries to meet him halfway, but with the effortless grace of an acrobat, he throws her over his shoulder. He has almost a foot of height on her; I peer from the top of the staircase as she is carried, kicking her legs, into the shadowed floor below. I don’t remember what she’s wearing, but her hair is a brown perm, laced with the gold of 1983 sunshine. Her face is toward me.

“Go upstairs John!” she shouts at me, with frantic eyes, as he carries her down. “Run!”

I do run. I run back to the bedroom, where I close the door. Sesame Street is still playing. Things have happened so quickly that the very same skit my dad and I were watching together when he suddenly threw me across the room—sculptor Ernie plopping an orange nose onto a clay Bert—is still playing.

There, quaking in shock, I feel the floorboards beneath me vibrate as my parents howl and wail. Then, muffled, they both go quiet, and I hear my father sobbing. It curdles at the edges: a sob of utter existential defeat. There’s no power in it at all.

And that’s when I finally start crying too.

My dad spent the night in the hospital, maybe two. It was explained to me he’d had a reaction to a new medication; weaned off it, my dad was back a few days later, good as new. We never spoke about what happened that day. When I was younger, I thought it would shame him; when he was older, he would have no longer remembered any of it.

But that was how I learned that my dad was mentally ill.

As I write this, a third of a century later—my father’s ashes carefully locked in a gold-foil vacuum seal bag and placed in an understated black urn on my desk, so I can look at him as I write—I marvel at how easily my father’s severe depression was slotted into that long-ago toddler’s universe. In the span of a nightmare, I effortlessly swallowed up this new and horrible fact that the author of my being was just a flipped neuron away from being an entirely different person, one who forgot who I was, and even attacked me.

But when I think harder about it, I suppose it’s not so surprising.

Even before his illness was revealed to me in such stark relief, he laid the groundwork preparing me to understand.

The Brownlee FamilyClockwise from left: Sally, Bruce, and John.

According to family legend, the day my parents took me home from the hospital, they got in their first fight about how I should be raised.

Tired, my mom had asked my father to watch me while she took a nap; when she woke up, my dad and I were cuddled up in the living room’s cathode-ray gloam, watching a lycanthropic Oliver Reed bare his fangs on Channel 56’s Creature Double Feature. As someone who has been on the end of them, I can imagine her reprimanding shrieks. But from that day on, monster movies became a lifetime bond between me and my father.

A few years later, I remember cheap vinyl socks crackling as I sleepily ambled downstairs at night in my Dr. Denton’s, drawn to the flickering, fluorescent orange-blue that filled the living room like will-o’-the-wisps. My dad was in there, drinking a beer—he would stop drinking entirely because of medications a few years later—and watching The Howling. He picked me up, sat me on his lap, and we watched the last few minutes together.

I remember a lustrously coiffured Dee Wallace as a nightly news anchorwoman transforming into a gossamer blonde werewolf before being shot to death on-air by her executive-producer boyfriend. I wasn’t scared. I was fascinated. But one thing confused me.

As Dad tucked me back into bed, not even bothering to ask me not to tell Mom about this—we were always complicit on the subject of monsters—I remember asking him: “Why was the monster lady crying at the end?”

“It’s because she’s not a monster. She can’t help it. She’s just cursed.”

He pursed his lips in dry mock seriousness, nodded sagaciously, and quipped: “She must have been having a bad hair day!” (My father and I shared a sense of humor that is best described as equal parts Evelyn Waugh, Groucho Marx, and Al Jaffee’s Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions.)

But then, I remember, he became thoughtful. He walked to the door, flicked off my bedroom light, and stood in the doorway. Molten around the edges, his far side illuminated, his profile an unknowable eclipse, he said: “It’s because she’s not a monster. She can’t help it. She’s just cursed. Love you, John.”

And then he shut the door.

So while it’s remarkable that I accepted my father’s depression so readily as a toddler—particularly following such a violent mental episode—it’s not so surprising when you realize that I already knew about werewolves. And what was my father if not a werewolf: the slave to the susurrus of primal tides whispering to him in a voice that only he could hear?

Panels from Tales from the Crypt No. 35, a horror comic John and Bruce used to read together. (Published with permission, William M Gaines Agent, Inc.)

Not that I believed lycanthropy was what literally had happened to my father that night when he shook me by the throat. I didn’t go into pre-school the next day, and, like Calvin, throw open my hands while dramatically intoning the title of an invisible ’50s movie marquee: “My Father Is a Werewolf!” I only mean to suggest that I accepted the fact of his personality-altering mental illness with the same innocence and appreciation of irony with which toddlers accept all fairy-tale curses.

Decades later, the werewolf analogy still helps me make sense of my father. Because, as with a werewolf, it is impossible to peel the man and the depression apart when you’re talking about him. They exist forever co-mingled, not in tooth-and-claw but in temperament.

Bruce Brownlee

My father, Bruce Gordon Brownlee, was born on December 30th, 1950, and died just 66 years and one month later.

As the oldest of three boys, his birthday caused him a great deal of anxiety growing up. He was never sure if there was a conspiracy between his parents to keep a few presents back from Santa to give him on his birthday, thus affecting a karmic sort of gift imbalance between him and his brothers. So, for his only son, he overcompensated. My Christmases growing up were maggoty with presents, and from my father—who never gave a gift that he wouldn’t want to get himself—my childhood was filled with formatively corrupting presents: sci-fi paperbacks, bound collections of horror comics with titles like Tales from the Crypt and The Haunt of Fear, and home-pirated VHS tapes packed with B-monster movies.

Dad spoiled me growing up, but he was generous with everyone, in quiet, understated ways that taught me a lot about what it meant to be giving. I remember, for example, that every time he went out shopping, he came home with a Hershey’s bar and a romance novel for my mother; unable to tell the covers apart, or remember the titles, he’d find ones she hadn’t read by checking the publication date. This is still, for me, the very definition of romance.

My father was generous, but he was also depressed, and the nature of depression is to be selfish.

I think about my father’s generosity a lot. My father was generous, but he was also depressed, and the nature of depression is to be selfish: to starve those who love you of the best of you, in the relentless feeding of that which can never be nourished. In that, he—the most depressed person I ever met—was also the most selfish. For my entire life, he would give me anything I asked for, as long as it was a movie or a book. But when my mother and I begged him half a dozen times to go see a doctor if he loved us, he wouldn’t lift a finger. How do generosity and selfishness co-exist like that in a person without destroying him?

I don’t know. And, of course, it did eventually destroy him. But that was my father: a lycanthrope of contrasts. Whatever he was, he was also the opposite.

Dad prided himself on his intelligence.

For a long time, I worshipped him for it. He was undeniably a brilliant man. As long as I knew him, he usually had two or three books going at once, ranging from trashy pulp paperbacks to sweeping overviews of post-Enlightenment culture. A shut-in for the last twenty years of his life, he probably read an average of a book a day. And if you were a fellow reader, to come over to his house meant having an armload of books foisted upon you: obscure Russian sci-fi novels, lectures by Nabokov, thick encyclopedias on film theory, or whatever other subjects your brief conversation might have touched on.

My dad’s recommendations were so good that, later in life, when he had been robbed of most of his memories, I would recommend books back to him that he’d made me read years before. He’d then brag to his friends about what great taste in books his son had, never knowing I’d grifted him with his own discernment and taste. (I don’t feel guilty. How many of us can say we’ve had the good fortune to read our favorite books for the first time twice?)

He knew just as much about film. Even more about music, if you can believe it. But none of his intelligence prevented him from being a colossal dumbass about the important things.

Take his health. The man—a three-to-four-pack-a-day smoker for most of his life—honestly believed that the health concerns around cigarettes were overblown. Since 1985, my parents lived on a steep hill, and the only sunlight he got for the last decade of his life was walking down to the corner to buy his Marlboro Lights 100s. In the last months of his life, it turned out that he had experienced light-headedness, numbness, and chest pains multiple times on this twice-weekly nicotine pilgrimage, but he never once told anyone about it. Instead, he would take so much aspirin his nose would bleed, while wrapping a frozen towel around his body like some sort of strange albino ice yogi, ignoring the tell-tale signs of what were proven later to be multiple heart attacks.

When he eventually had such a massive cardiac event that his heart practically exploded on the spot, my mother told me she thought he’d known he was having heart attacks but chose to ignore them as a way of killing himself. This, I think, is putting an overly heroic sheen on it, but the interpretation doesn’t surprise me. My mother worshipped my father, and there’s something noble about a slow, plausibly deniable suicide. But an intelligent, well-read man ignoring the obvious signs of his own impending heart attack while his loved ones beg him to see a doctor? That’s just the setup to a bad fucking joke.

The truth is, as I knew him, my father in his later years was a man who could intellectualize his way around anything, up to and including his own heart attacks. Intelligence, for him, had become not a tool to be applied to the real world, but something that replaced it: the ultimate nicotine patch.

A self-described “Jeffersonian liberal” and “Buckley man,” some of these justifications were political. Incapable of earning a living, my father railed bitterly against social welfare programs designed to help people like him, despite the fact that if it were not for my mother, he could not afford to treat his depression. Likewise, my father was a lifelong defender of science and sweat profusely if the mercury went above 68, but when he died, his reading table was stacked with small press treatises denying climate change.

Yet if anything, I found these rationalizations more understandable for having been political. Such intellectual infections are as subjective as they are universal; not so his other justifications, which served no other purpose than to shield him from the quick of life.

In the last years of his life, flesh-and-blood experiences became things no longer worth having. So though, through his library, he’d practically lived in Europe since he was 18, he never expressed interest in coming to visit me during the decade I lived there; there was nothing there, he insinuated, he hadn’t already experienced. Likewise, if Mozart himself had come back to life, my father–the man who took me to see Miles Davis live when I was three–would have expressed no interest in seeing him perform.

Before my father died, I once thoughtlessly told him that I didn’t care if my own kids grew up to be intelligent as long as they grew up to be kind, daring, and hardworking. To that, he didn’t say anything. He just lit a cigarette. Or he tried to. His hand was shaking so badly, he lit his sleeve on fire.

Intellect, you see, was all the self-worth he had left.

Growing up, my dad was my best friend. We were more than inseparable buddies; he was my hero.

When I was just a toddler, and his depression wasn’t as bad as it would one day become, my dad would take me down to Brookline every Sunday to a movie theater called Off-the-Wall. There, he would buy me a brownie, and we would watch old Buster Keaton shorts, while a tweed-decked septuagenarian accompanied the flickering silver screen on an out-of-tune ragtime piano. This is a quintessential “Dad” memory for me: How could anyone have a better date with their father?

When I was four or five, we played the same game every night. It went like this: right after my dad read my bedtime story to me, he would grab my favorite bath toy—a rubber rooster with a built-in squeaker that kind of looked like a down-rent Foghorn Leghorn—and jump under the covers with me. There, we would hide, snorting and giggling, until my mom came in to play her part. “Where’s Bruce and John?” she’d ask, ever the straight man, while the squirming, human-size lumps under the Return of the Jedi duvet responded in chorus: “Nobody here but us chickens! Cheep, cheep, cheep.”

My dad and I loved to draw together. He was particularly great at it, especially before his meds took away his hand coordination. One of his cartoons, called “My Pal, the Trashcan,” still sits framed on my desk, 33 years after he drew it. It’s essentially a self-portrait. My dad stands in the background with a fedora and an exclamation point above his head. I’m the pot-bellied kid, his belly button peeking out. My pal’s, quite obviously, the trashcan…not to be confused with the mythical toilet from which my father always insisted, with great solemnity, he had plucked me as a baby and for whom I am named: John.

My Pal, the TrashcanBruce Brownlee

No one made me laugh harder. When I went to summer camp, he would send me care packages of comics and non sequitur postcards that were so hilarious that my camp counselors would read them aloud to the entire camp over mail call. One, featuring Humphrey Bogart smoking a cigarette, says on the back: “Dear John–Going through some old photographs, we came upon this baby picture of you! Boy, you sure were cute. (Note the pacifier.)” Another, which I’ve sadly lost, alleges to feature him indulging in extracurricular activities during a typical day at summer camp in the ’50s; the picture on front is Indiana Jones punching out a Nazi.

Years before MST3K, he and his brother, my Uncle Bob, initiated me to the joys of movie-riffing, ragging on movies like Plan 9 from Outer Space and Robot Monster until I was practically hyperventilating with laughter. He introduced me to Harvey Kurtzman, Firesign Theater, Jeeves and Wooster, MadMagazine… influences which shape my sense of humor to this day.

We even traveled together. I remember a family trip we once took to Minnesota, where he kept me busy for three days straight by feeding me horror comics he’d squirreled away under the driver’s seat. One summer, we went down to Washington, D.C., to visit Uncle Bob, and he took me to a John Zorn concert, where the avant-garde saxophonist performed a cover of the ’60s Batman theme as if just for me.

These are the years I remember most vividly about my father.

The further back I go, the more clearly defined he was.It’s when I remember him in the later years of his life that he grows hazier. The memories themselves don’t go fuzzy; he does.

In 1989, my father—bullied at work for his mental illness—quit his job and became, for all intents and purposes, a shut-in.

As a writer, it makes me sad that, for what would end up being the last three decades of his life, there’s almost nothing to describe about this period, except to say it was one of slow-motion entropy. During it, he gradually lost abilities most of us wouldn’t even think to call “skills”: To pick up the phone and call someone, go visit a relative, or even just open the mail.

Within just a few years, my father’s entire life circumscribed an irregular quadrangle just a couple thousand square feet in area. One axis was the local gas station, where he bought his cigarettes; another, his bed, where he slept 16 hours a day. A third was his office, where he kept his computer and which—after his death—was so clogged with depression and ash that you would believe he’d been cremated there on the spot. The last axis was the couch, where a Dad-shaped indentation weighs down the springs to this day. It was here he read books, watched movies, and drank coffee by the pot.

Over time, he started refusing to see his psychiatrist regularly. This didn’t result in him being cut off from his meds: His psychiatrist continued to prescribe them based on my father’s emails and my mother’s reports on how Dad was doing.

He also stopped seeing other doctors. The result was that we no longer had any idea how many of his shakes and tremors were because of his meds and which were because of his undiagnosed illnesses.

Likewise, he wouldn’t see dentists, so he started losing his teeth. His resulting self-consciousness formed a closed feedback loop with his depression, dead-bolting him in the house. His hair grew long and lanky; he became so pale as to be nearly translucent. At 65, almost nocturnal, he had the look of a toothless white wolf.

Every werewolf story is about a silver bullet.

This was true for my father. But the silver bullet he believed would one day cure him wasn’t literal. It was some magic drug that would one day be fired out of the rotating barrels of a pharmaceutical company’s R&D revolver.

If you suggested that he go for a walk or a run, or go with you to a movie, or volunteer somewhere, or see a therapist, Dad would openly scoff: He’d tried all that, and the only thing that ever worked against his depression was drugs.

“No one really understands why the brain works the way it does.”

In his youth, he’d apparently abused alcohol and experimented with psychedelics; it was to his great credit that, once I was born, he’d mostly given these up for my mother. “Booze was the only thing that ever really made me happy,” he once told me, wistfully, through the literal rose-colored sunglasses he wore whenever he left the house, even on the cloudiest days.

But until I was about 27 or so, he still held out hope that the next medication he was prescribed would be the one that would finally obliterate his depression.

“No one really understands why the brain works the way it does,” he would often say, like a priest reciting a holy mystery. According to this logic, then, it was just a roll of the dice before the pharmacologists stumbled upon the mystical alignment of molecules that would make his brain work like it should. Until that moment arrived, there was little point in doing anything but wait; happiness could not be found in anything but chemistry.

Yet even from an early age, I was doubtful my father would recognize the silver bullet he was looking for if and when it ever came for him. If you asked him on any given day how he was feeling, he’d reply: “It’s the worst day of my life,” no matter whether he was comatose with depression or talking to you on your wedding day. It was almost like my dad had lost his inner compass to tell you how he was feeling: even if he acted like he was feeling better, he’d tell you he was feeling worse.

I once asked my dad what he thought happiness was; he told me it was a gin and tonic. He wasn’t joking. The only way my father could imagine the experience of not being depressed anymore was to equate it with being euphorically drunk or high. But this isn’t what wellness is. Neurotypical humans still feel sad, and hopeless, and anxious, and overwhelmed. It isn’t that they are happy all the time: it’s that they’re capable of happiness in the first place. I realized my dad didn’t understand this, and because he didn’t understand it, all his silver bullets would inevitably wear away to show the brass beneath.

No wonder the medications he thought were “working” made him manic, and inevitably led to deep crashes, which just made him ever more desperate.

No wonder the silver bullet he eventually turned to came from a can.

Tales From The CryptNo. 35 (Published with permission, William M Gaines Agent, Inc.)

One morning, shortly before dawn, my mother awoke from a nightmare very early to find herself sleeping alone. This wasn’t unusual—my dad was a night owl—but when she went downstairs, she found him in the living room, drinking a six-pack by himself.

It was a bigger deal than it sounds. Drinking while taking the sort of meds he was on could trigger another violent episode like the one that had happened so many years before. Twenty-odd years earlier, in fact, my mom threatened to leave Dad if he ever drank again. From then on, he never drank a drop.

But he was drinking now. It was a sign of how truly desperate things had become.

My mother didn’t leave him. How could she? She worshipped him. But as a last-ditch effort to cure his depression, they went to his psychiatrist and told him—over the doctor’s objections, surprisingly—that they wanted to try something extreme: electro-convulsive treatment, or ECT.

In other words, electroshock.

In other words, electroshock.

I was 26 or 27 and living abroad when my mother called to tell me about this.

“No one really knows why it works, but it does,” my mother insisted, blindly repeating one of my father’s holy mysteries into the telephone mouthpiece. “It’s not like in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Really, the stigma of this treatment has really prevented a lot of people from being helped!”

Stunned, I said nothing.

More to fill the silence than anything, my mom told me all the possible side effects: confusion, disorientation, memory loss. But those side-effects would be temporary, and if it worked, my dad’s depression might be cured.

When she was finally talked out, I stammered: “When do you think… when would this start?”

A long pause.

It had already started.

Initially, I followed the lead of my father’s black humor and treated his ECT like a joke.

From my mother, I heard that my dad had ironically started wearing a T-shirt with Daffy Duck dressed as Napoleon to his ECT sessions. Delighted, I completed his outfit by mailing him a crushed velvet bicorne, replete with a large N stitched in French piping across the front. Eventually, I heard from my mother—my dad was always too tired to talk on the phone during this period—that this ensemble was eventually banned from the ECT ward, not because it was insensitive, but because it was making Dad’s fellow depressives laugh too much.

It was only when I came home for Christmas that I realized exactly how invasive the treatment really was.

It was a few months after his treatments began, and he’d had a session before my plane arrived.

“Look, Bruce, it’s John!” my mother said, with a not-quite-convincing air of nonchalance when he came slumping down the stairs as we arrived home from the airport.

My dad covered up his confusion, but I could tell he didn’t recognize me at all.

And suddenly, ECT didn’t seem so funny.

In the end, my father had about 18 ECT sessions over six months. “Far, far too many,” my mom said gravely when I asked her to confirm that number ahead of writing this. (Patients usually receive six to twelve sessions.) “We should never have kept going.”

Looking back, it’s hard not to agree. But for a while, the changes seemed miraculous.

Yes, my dad’s memory was shot. When it came to me, it was as if he’d experienced a time jump. He remembered me up until my tenth birthday or so, after which, I suddenly aged 17 years overnight.

Those memories never came back; to reminisce with him about something, I’d have to tell him the memory first. He simply had no recollection of how I had grown into the man I had become, and for the rest of his life, viewed me with a combination of love and awe, as if he wondered: How can this normal, functional person be my son?

But it had its advantages. For example, I no longer had to worry about whether or not I was buying books he’d already read for Christmas or his birthday. We got to watch Robot Monster together and laugh at the Billion Bubble Machine all over again, as if for the first time. And it blotted from my dad’s memory some of the more embarrassing or shitty things he’d caught me doing over the years: when I’d stolen money from his wallet as a teenager, for example, or the time he’d caught me watching some vintage ’70s porn when I was 15.

I also enjoyed my father’s utter incredulity about some of the more peculiar specifics of our shared history. For example, when I was 19, my dad once woke me up in the middle of the night in a panic. He had somehow infected my mother’s work computer with a virus that had converted the screen of her Windows 95 desktop into what can only be described as a pornographic amalgam of pulsating, 16-bit genitalia. “I don’t know what I did, but you gotta help me get it off before your mom wakes up, John!” he hissed to me through the door.

My dad was in stitches when I told him this; he just couldn’t believe it had happened.

The reason my mother and I were able to overlook my dad’s memory loss was because he suddenly wanted to do things again.

In the middle of his treatments, Mom and Dad took a trip up to Wells Beach in Maine, where I was conceived. There, they walked the beach and talked about their future…something they hadn’t done for years, because depression has no future.

They talked about their future… something they hadn’t done for years, because depression has no future.

And Mom wasn’t the only one who benefited. On my second visit home after his ECT, my dad asked me to take a walk with him, seemingly for the hell of it. We walked for about a half hour, talking about movies. To this day, although I can barely remember where we walked or what we discussed, the emotional memory of that walk makes something swell painfully in my throat.

The truth was that I could live with a father who didn’t remember where I came from, as long as we had a future together.

Right before I moved to Ireland, I remember coming home one night and finding my dad in the living room, sitting quietly. I thought I’d join him, but as I approached the couch, his eyes barely flickered at me before resting back on the silent TV. I must have thought he was engrossed in a movie—maybe one of those old silent movies we used to watch together—but when I sat down, I saw the television was off.

“Watching a ‘Zero-D’ movie, huh, Dad?” I asked him, recycling one of his favorite jokes–a play on 3-D movies–from when I would hide my eyes while watching scary movies as a kid.

He didn’t laugh. He didn’t smile. His eyes didn’t shift. He just kept smoking, silently. And when he was done, he stubbed out the butt and lit another one, just as quietly.

We sat there for some time, at midnight, watching nothing together. Then I kissed him on the forehead and went to bed, knowing in my heart that the next time I flew back to the States, it might be because he’d spilt his veins into the sink.

Compared to the fatalism of my father’s impending suicide, ECT seemed like a godsend.

My father was the one person who didn’t think the ECT had worked. But we didn’t take him seriously.

We didn’t really listen. True, my father wasn’t really a reliable narrator of his own experience: He was the man who called wolf because there was always one hiding right behind his eyes. But that’s not why we didn’t listen. We ignored him because his memory loss seemed inconsequential compared to the fact that after years of neglecting our needs and wants, he was finally giving us new memories to remember him by.

But my dad was right. A year later, maybe two, his depression was worse than ever, except now, he was only a shell of who he once was. For a while, yes, he was disoriented enough to be more compliant with us, to go with the flow. But that compliance was never happiness.

ECT didn’t work, at least for him. It didn’t cure his depression, any more than you can cure a werewolf by ripping out his fangs. For my father, the books he’d read, the movies he’d seen, the albums he’d listened to were his eyeteeth, and by taking them out, all we’d done was succeed in making him toothless. In his compliance, yes, we mistook him for tamer, and in his tameness, we mistook him for being—if not happy—then well. But ECT had robbed him of his sense of self.

He didn’t die immediately after that. In fact, he lived another ten years. But he never tried to get better again.

John’s Wedding: The author’s wife and her parents, then from left to right, the author, Sally, and Bruce

When I was a teenager, I felt like I was the first person whose soul was ever scraped raw by the world. When I met others who felt the same way, we bonded to each other like barnacles. Although I don’t have that much in common with them anymore, these teenage friends are still the ones closest to my heart. It’s probably the same for you.

When my father was a teenager, he had a wickedly clever friend. His name was John.

My father and John found companionship in their love of pulp fiction, weird movies, jazz, rock, and psychedelic drugs. They also connected over their mutual battle with depression.

Then, when he was 24, John murdered his parents. He stabbed his mother to death with a butcher’s knife and killed his father while he was watching TV, smashing the elder’s skull in from behind with a single blow from a sledgehammer.

For his crime, John was institutionalized for life. After that, my dad never seemed quite comfortable making close male friends anymore.

I often wonder about this friendship. What was it like for my father?

For a few years, you have this friend, who loves all the things that you do and shares all the things you’re going through. For the first time, you feel understood. But then, this friend, this doppelgänger, turns out to be a maniac and has to be locked up.

Do you come to believe the inevitable endpoint of your depression is insanity, then being locked away forever?

If so, perhaps it was a foregone conclusion that once my father attacked me and my mother, he would believe that he should be locked away. And if the outside world wasn’t going to do it, his subconscious would.

After all, every werewolf story also ends up with self-imprisonment—ostensibly to protect others, but really so the werewolf can protect itself from the wounds of the world.

There’s a theme in literature, closely related in its own way to the duality of the werewolf myth, that I know resonated with my father.

“What makes Hornblower a hero is that he secretly believes he’s a coward,” he once told me when crushing one of his favorite C. S. Forester novels into my hand. “It’s what makes him act, but it’s also what torments him: the insistent belief that if another man were in his place, he would have acted without the same fears and self-doubts.”

What appealed to him in the adventures of Horatio Hornblower was the enormous divide—present even in great men—between our perception of ourselves and the qualities of the person we want to be. It is, I think, a divide that every self-aware adult can identify with; only sociopaths feel there is no divide within themselves at all.

The divide never goes away, but those of us who are able to achieve contentedness in our lives are able to bridge this gap over time, establishing a link of understanding between the reality of our condition and our own expectations of ourselves. A life well-lived is one that adds new boards and nails to that bridge every day.

As for depression, it’s the chasm that exists between. You build your bridge, don’t look down, and pray it never swallows you, because if it does, you’ll fall forever in that bottomless gulf, and die without ever landing.

That was my dad. The bridge he tried to build for himself earlier in his life inevitably broke underneath him. And in the gulf into which he fell, he fell forever, stranded within arm’s reach of both the person he was and the person he most wanted to be. We, those who loved him, wanted him to climb out, but the gulf was too wide. Once he fell, the closest we ever saw him come was when his fingers scraped the sides.

My father was my hero, but he was also the person I spent my whole life trying as hard as I knew how not to be. It’s filled me with complicated feelings about him—feelings I don’t know I will ever entirely know how to resolve.

So if, through depression, he was what I’ve called him—a lycanthrope of contrasts—then I’m a werewolf too.

When I remember him, the full moon will ever rise upon my thoughts.

Tales From The CryptNo. 39 (Published with permission, William M Gaines Agent, Inc.)

“I cry so much I worry he will remember his childhood filled with tears. I cry because there are so many things I don’t want to forget—the way he pecks like a bird for my breast and sometimes mistakes his knuckle for me, his little knee bent while he feeds … his noises, his smell—oh God, his smell.”

“It’s just that sometimes I am a robot playing his mother. I still don’t know how to be his mother. I am always looking out of the robot’s eyes, never sure completely whether I truly feel this thing or that, or if it’s because I ‘should’ feel it.”

I wrote those words in my journal a few months after giving birth to my oldest son in 2010. The joy of bringing a new child into my family was often clouded over by moments of intense depression and anxiety, which lingered untreated even up to a year and a half later.

Sometimes I would write about “the robot.” On darker days, I wrote about hurting myself, what it would be like to just not live anymore. I was instantly aware of how selfish it sounded for a mother of an infant to think about killing herself. That guilt made the situation even worse—and of course, harder to talk to anyone about.

I was not supposed to feel like this.

I was not supposed to feel like this. My Facebook feed was filled with beautiful photos of softly swaddled, happy infants and mothers (in fact, I had put more than a few of those photos out there myself). Everywhere there were blog posts and even strangers in Target admonishing me to, “make every minute count” because “they grow up so fast.”

Was I supposed to make these minutes count, the minutes when I lay in bed, running a finger over my numb c-section scar and crying myself to sleep? I just wanted those minutes to be over.

As my baby grew older, I would structure my day around his naps, scheduling work that needed to be done in the hourlong scraps of time I thought I could rely on. When he didn’t fit into that schedule, I sank deeper into the hole. I was exhausted. There was never a time I didn’t feel like someone needed something from me, and there didn’t seem to be much left to begin with.

The author and her two sons today.

Complicating matters was the fact that I lived in a small town in Michigan. On the days I felt strong enough to advocate for myself and get help, I dialed number after number of psychologists and psychiatrists. I had the benefit of good insurance through my husband, but I was turned away due to not enough supply of mental health professionals to meet the local demand. One therapist told me, “I’ve got a waiting list for my waiting list.”

I called the local hospital one day and pleaded to be connected to someone who could help me. I was having thoughts of self-harm, I told them, but I wasn’t able to find a therapist who could see me. They asked if I had Medicaid to qualify for mental health services. I did not. They didn’t have any alternatives to the crossed-out list already in front of me, and I hung up, dejected once again. Moments later, my phone rang from my local 911 dispatcher. Was I OK? She had received a call from the hospital. How could she help? I laughed into the phone. “Can you find me a therapist?”

My phone rang from my local 911 dispatcher. Was I OK? I laughed into the phone. “Can you find me a therapist?”

When my son was about 15 months old, I finally got help. I started seeing a therapist once a week. It wasn’t a cure-all solution, and I still battled depression off and on. My therapist made me sign a contract that I’d call 911 or go to the ER if I had more thoughts of self-harm. I spent one January night sitting in the parking lot at the hospital, debating whether I should check myself in or not. Where would they send me? What would happen to our son? I was his primary caregiver in those days.

Slowly the fog lifted. With the help of my therapist, I was able to look at my situation with a bit more clarity and compassion. I needed help, and not just psychological help. I needed help taking care of my child, time for my own work (which had fallen by the wayside) and self care.

I didn’t know it at the time, but I also could have benefitted from a community that could help me navigate this transition into motherhood. I realized how isolated I had become. My family was scattered several hours away. I had few good friends in those days who were parents. I had always been so independent and self-reliant; the benefit of reaching out to a group of people who was going through what I was going through was a foreign concept to me.

The next time, I would change all of that.

In 2014, my husband accepted a new job in Texas, and I discovered that I was pregnant with our second baby. As we drove our loaded-up minivan across the country, I plotted how I would do things differently. And if I was lucky enough to escape postpartum depression this time, I vowed to do something to help other women in my situation.

If I was lucky enough to escape postpartum depression this time, I vowed to do something to help other women in my situation.

The first thing I did was create an online community, a private Facebook group, for other people who had struggled with postpartum anxiety and depression, and therefore could understand what each other were going through. Here we could speak openly and frankly in a nonjudgmental setting. I spread the word among all the parenting groups I knew, and instantly I connected with several people who understood my exact struggle.

That spawned real-life group therapy sessions, where local moms shared their stories with a local therapist, and we all helped each other come up with strategies and coping mechanisms.

I started volunteering for the Pregnancy and Postpartum Health Alliance of Texas, eventually earning a scholarship to study to become a postpartum doula specializing in helping mothers with postpartum depression and anxiety. I had never heard of a postpartum doula before—essentially, they provide the extra hands and hearts of a surrogate family member, coming in to help new mothers after the birth of their babies with everything from practical day-to-day tasks like washing dishes and playing with older siblings to just listening to moms and dads and their challenges.

These experiences opened my eyes to the heartbreaking reality of postpartum mood disorders.

Before when I struggled alone, I kept telling myself “this can’t be the reality for most women,” but unfortunately, in my talks with other mothers since them, I have found that suffering in silence is quite common. The American Psychological Association estimates that one in seven mothers experience postpartum depression.

The intrusive thoughts associated with postpartum anxiety and OCD are actually very common, and with help, can be managed and overcome.

We are conditioned not to talk about these symptoms. I learned that the intrusive thoughts associated with postpartum anxiety and OCD are actually very common, and with help, can be managed and overcome. However, because of headline-grabbing cases of women who harm their children due to postpartum psychosis (a rare but serious postpartum illness), we are frightened into not speaking the words that actually have the power to help us heal.

We have such a long way to go before women suffering from postpartum mood disorders are properly cared for and supported in a comprehensive, meaningful way and feel comfortable speaking their truth without fear, but I hope that essays like this in some way help to further the dialogue.

It’s almost guaranteed I will hear from other mothers after they read these words. Whenever I speak out about postpartum mood disorders (it’s becoming a bit of a soapbox for me), friends message me sharing their own stories that they too have suffered or are currently living in the shadow of postpartum depression or anxiety.

Talk to someone…you’ll be surprised at the number of people who will feel empowered by your act of strength.

For women living in rural communities or areas without access to mental health resources, my best suggestion is to talk to someone–a friend, your partner, your OB or physician. Maybe you can find (or form) a group like I did.

You’ll be surprised at the number of people who will feel empowered by your act of strength, even if you don’t feel very strong. Talking about postpartum mood disorders rather than living in the shadows is the first step toward taking away their power and finding your own once again.

Prizewinning conductor Ronald Braunstein had a much-heralded early career in the classical music scene that began to unravel due to his bipolar disorder. But his experience with this condition eventually led to the founding of the Me2/Orchestra: the world’s only classical music ensemble for the mentally ill (and their advocates).

The conceptual origins of Me2/ date back to 2007, when Braunstein, then living in Prague, observed the huge gap in music education between public and private schools. “I wanted to create an orchestra that was inclusive of students from all socio-economic levels. The idea never went anywhere in Prague but I picked up that seed a few years later in Burlington [Vermont] – only this time my heart was in it. The inclusion I sought had to do with mental health rather than economic disparity,” he says.

There was good reason why mental health was a priority: Braunstein had just been fired from a job because of his bipolar disorder. “I was in the process of sorting out my mental and physical health and I knew I didn’t want to get a job where I could be discriminated against again. I decided to create my own orchestra and ensure that it was a safe place,” he says, before adding, “I knew that if I was feeling so much pain from being discriminated against that there must be other people like me.”

Ronald Braunstein.

I knew that if I was feeling so much pain from being discriminated against that there must be other people like me.”

Braunstein, who was born in Massachusetts but raised in Pittsburgh, says that as a child his father took him to see a doctor, who diagnosed him with “bad nerves” and “prescribed some type of medication, maybe it was valium.” He adds how, “Over the years several people told me that I needed to see ‘a doctor,’ but this was during the ’70s when nobody spoke [about] mental health and I honestly didn’t know what they were trying to tell me.” For many years he contended with symptoms “but things started to get really revved-up in [his] early twenties.”

While studying at New York City’s famed Juilliard School his condition became severe. “I ate very little and didn’t sleep. I thought that food and sleep took away my brilliance. I experienced all of the classic bipolar behavior: delusions of grandeur, rapid pressured speech, irresponsibility in dealing with money, etc.”

However, he managed to graduate from Juilliard in 1978 with a degree in conducting. And at age 23, he became the first American to win the Gold Medal in the Herbert von Karajan International Conducting Competition in Berlin. This prize greatly boosted his early career and took him all over the world as a guest conductor at orchestras ranging from San Francisco to Norway to Japan. He later joined the Juilliard conducting staff.

Braunstein was first diagnosed with bipolar disorder in 1985. “I took a friend to his psychiatrist appointment,” he recalls. “And, through an odd turn of events, I walked away from that office with my own diagnosis.” He feels that the stigma surrounding mental illness has decreased since the time of his diagnosis, but “we still have a long way to go.” That said, he hasn’t encountered any stigma-related obstacles when trying to arrange a Me2/ performance. And he views the orchestra as helping to “change audience members’ perceptions” about the mentally ill by “showing what we are capable of in performances.”

Many believe a link exists between creativity and mental illness, and Braunstein notices a particular prevalence of bipolar disorder among the musically gifted

Many believe a link exists between creativity and mental illness, and Braunstein notices a particular prevalence of bipolar disorder among the musically gifted. Of brilliant composers likely afflicted, he gives a slew of examples: Schumann, Tchaikovsky, Mahler, Berlioz, Bruckner, Rachmaninoff, Elgar, Handel, Holst, Mussorgsky, and Rossini. Another prominent example is his favorite composer, Beethoven. He also admires Tchaikovsky, Johannes Brahms, Otto Klemperer (whose battle with bipolar disorder was well-documented), and Igor Stravinsky. Among his influences are Leonard Bernstein, Seiji Ozawa and, especially, his mentor Herbert von Karajan, the longtime conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, who taught him “how to really hear the orchestra” while conducting.

Braunstein conducting the Me2/Orchestra.

Of his own dual experience with gifted musicianship and mental illness, he says: “When I am in a manic phase I can be brilliant, or so it seems. When I come to a more stable point I can see whether the brilliance was actual or an illusion. And then there’s the question I always have after conducting a great concert: whether it was my musicianship or my illness.” He says that his symptoms are managed more effectively these days and are less likely to distort his self-perception. Previously, he was more inclined to have a “lack of insight into how [he] was doing” and hold an unrealistic opinion of his performance.

The question I always have after conducting a great concert [is] whether it was my musicianship or my illness.

The flagship chapter of Me2/ was established in September 2011 in Burlington, Vermont. September 2014 saw the launching of the Boston chapter. Though many members have diagnosed conditions, Me2/ also includes those who support the mentally ill, along with mental health professionals, such as one psychiatrist who plays trumpet for the Boston orchestra.

Me2/ has performed at several formidable venues, such as prisons and psychiatric hospitals – settings that don’t exactly evoke thoughts of classical music, but actually have provided the most engaged and appreciative audiences. In such places, the music “reaches their souls,” observes Braunstein, who adds how Me2/ has “never been unappreciated” at any type of venue.

Currently, fifty musicians belong to the Me2/Burlington, and the Boston chapter has 35. The orchestras perform 5 or 6 times per concert season. Of the musicians who join, almost all stay for a long period. There are no auditions to worry about. Braunstein’s programs are “designed for the middle-level of the orchestra. For the people who are less experienced, we offer coaching but technical perfection is not what we are about. We have professional musicians sitting alongside near-beginners and it works.” Many other members are skilled amateurs who “received extensive training earlier in life.”

Among mentally ill members, conditions range from depression to PTSD to schizophrenia to dissociative disorder, among others. Members aren’t required to disclose their diagnoses, but some do so “within the first 5 minutes.” Others are less than forthcoming at first. Braunstein recalls one member who “didn’t want her name printed in materials because she didn’t want to be associated with ‘the mental health orchestra.’ She didn’t disclose her diagnosis for a long time; however, after playing with us for a few years she has now become an outspoken advocate about erasing stigma.”

Though a few members prefer to keep to themselves, many others become friends and socialize outside of Me2/. Braunstein describes rehearsals as “extremely social” and adds that the “positive energy is palpable.” He recalls one man who, after a few months with the orchestra, had reconnected with his long-estranged extended family because Me2/ “gave him the confidence and self-respect he needed.”

Another member considers each Me2/ rehearsal his “detox” from the remainder of the week. And for some members with a tendency to self-isolate, the orchestra “gets them out of the house and surrounded by supportive friends once a week.”

Braunstein currently lives in Burlington, Vermont, with his wife, Caroline Whiddon, a Me2/ cofounder who serves as Executive Director and also plays the French horn. They drive back and forth from Burlington to Boston each week, as the Boston orchestra rehearses every Monday and the Burlington one every Thursday.

“[Music] is a space to be in that is safe and beautiful… it has given my life meaning.”

The conductor’s future aspirations are “to continue to grow and learn as a musician and a human being. Me2/ is my project for life.” His life-project has grand plans in store: A Me2/ chapter has just launched in Portland, Oregon, and Braunstein anticipates another chapter launching this summer in Atlanta, Georgia. In three years, he hopes to have 20 affiliate programs in various cities. Ten years from now, he sees Me2/ having “affiliate programs nationwide, including orchestras and various ensembles.” He also envisions “hosting conferences where Me2/ members from various locations come together to rehearse and perform in massive events.”

Though some afflicted persons might view music as an escape from psychological duress, Braunstein prefers to think of music as “a space to be in that is safe and beautiful.” When asked about the effect of Me2/ on him personally, he concisely replies, “It has given my life meaning.”

Me2/ is open to ages 13-80+ and there’s no cost to participate. For further information, see the website.

Like many young artists, Andrea Joyce Heimer spent her early twenties stuck in an office job that she didn’t like while she tried to find her creative voice. Unable to afford art school, she was determined to teach herself to paint in a photorealistic manner — the only style she thought could convey the adolescent memories she wanted to depict. But no matter how many instructional books she bought or how hard she tried, she couldn’t master perspective. Eventually, she quit out of frustration.

Andrea Heimer.

Around the same time, Heimer, who had been struggling with anxiety and depression since high school, fell into one of her deepest depressions. She couldn’t get herself out of the house for weeks. “It was like I just hit a wall,” she says. “I thought, ‘I’m going to off myself unless I figure out something to keep me busy.’”

Still surrounded by art supplies, Heimer decided pick up a brush again. This time, however, she wasn’t going to worry about what the painting looked like. She told herself, “I’m just going to do it how it comes out. I’m going to return to childhood where I just draw for the fun of it.”

She ended up painting four pieces. The paintings were all flat, with no shading and the perspective was skewed. But there was something appealing about them. With encouragement from her husband, she reached out to some folk art galleries and received a positive response from the first place she contacted. She was still stuck in a depressive loop, but that positive reply gave her just enough of “a little oomph” to make another painting and then another. Slowly but surely, that momentum built on itself, eventually pulling her out of her dark hole.

Having dispensed with spatial perspective, her paintings are filled with layers of detail, all floating on the same plane

Today, Heimer is a full-time artist, splitting her time between an MFA program in New Hampshire and her home in Washington. Having dispensed with spatial perspective, her paintings are filled with layers of detail, all floating on the same plane. Objects and characters that might otherwise be hidden are brought into view, unveiling the mystery and violence hidden just below the surface of suburban neighborhoods. The effect is akin to Grandma Moses meets David Lynch. In her acrylic world, ordinary rites of passage collide with mystical rituals: cult members argue over wallpaper choices, giant wolves suckle teenage boys, and a devoted husband drinks his wife’s bathwater. At the same time, kids get bowl cuts in the living room, bad boys hang out at the baseball diamond “being dangerous and irresistible,” and girls cultivate crushes that are mythical in scope.

Often only 16 inches by 20 inches, or smaller, her paintings reward viewers who pause for a closer look. Minute patterns on wallpaper and clothing reveal themselves to be cowboys and Indians, thunderstorms and rainbows, or a starry cosmos of planets and comets. These repeated patterns are therapeutic for Heimer. Even when the painting doesn’t aesthetically need the patterning, Heimer needs it. “For someone who has tendencies to overthink things, it’s such a relief to go do something repetitive,” she says. “It’s that meditative process of drawing the same tiny design over and over and over again–you can lose yourself completely for two hours just doing that.” To paint these details, she leans close to the canvas, keeping her face only an inch away from the surface. “I’m sure that’s terrible for my spine,” she says. “But it’s that intimate time spent with that object that breathes more life into it. I miss that when it’s not there.”

It’s that intimate time spent with that object that breathes more life into it.

Heimer began developing a keen eye for detail early on. When she was in third grade, her parents pulled her aside after dinner and told her that she was adopted. Visibly uncomfortable, they kept the conversation short, and didn’t discuss it again. Determined to never be surprised like that again, she became a studious observer of life in her hometown of Great Falls, Montana.

“You’re going along, you have this normal life … and then all of a sudden you find out that your parents aren’t who you think they are,” explains Heimer. “Then that opens a door. You’re like, ‘Okay, well what else isn’t what it seems?’’’

Great Falls sits on the northern Great Plains, surrounded by vast stretches of open prairie. “You can literally find the edge of town and go stand there. There’s nothing beyond it, which is an unnerving thing,” says Heimer. The neighborhood she grew up in, however, felt like a typical suburb. She lived a couple blocks away from her elementary school. There was a park across the street from their house and beyond that a golf course.

Heimer would spend hours riding her bike past the houses, coming up with narratives about the lives inside. “I don’t know if there’s some underlying perversion in me, or something. Maybe it’s a normal tendency. You ride the same route and you start noticing the same people and you wonder, ‘Are their lives like my life?’”

Heimer at work in her studio.

As a goth teenager, she’d go to music shows and sit in the parking lot because she was more interested in listening to people’s conversations than the bands inside. “I would sit in my car a lot with the window down pretending to read a book or something, but really I was listening to the people who were standing next to my car talking,” she says. “Saying it now, I’m like, ‘God, what a weirdo. Just go talk to somebody like a normal person.’”

All those years of listening have turned into a wealth of stories to draw upon — and led to conversations that Heimer could never have predicted as a teen. “The paintings are almost like — this is going to sound so stupid — but I feel like each one has its own personality or its own magnetic force,” she says. “I feel like they’re little people trying to help me along.”

I feel like each [painting] has its own personality or its own magnetic force… like they’re little people trying to help me along.

The lively, diary-like revelations in her paintings seems to help others open up as well. “I don’t know if it’s because a lot of them are very embarrassing, but you would not believe the things that people tell me at openings,” she says. “After a two-minute conversation, they’ll confess something really deep or embarrassing or touching. I wasn’t expecting those interactions, and they make me feel good in a way that nothing else does.”

Heimer has found that these moments of connection give her a sense of buoyancy that helps counteract the weight depression. She is pursuing her MFA in part so that she can teach part-time and make interacting with others a more regular occurrence. “I realized that I was spending eight hours a day alone in the studio painting. That’s not healthy either,” she says. “I totally love being around art students. It’s another magical thing, being around other people who are making things and learning.”

“I don’t want to be super dramatic and be like, ‘It’s given me something to live for,’” says Heimer of her art. “The pace and the momentum of it, I think, help. I still have medication. I do all the stuff that I’m supposed to. But there’s something about that forward momentum. It doesn’t have to come from a painting career. It can be anything that you care about that propels you forward.”

https://folks.pillpack.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/exile.jpg26343300April Kilcreasehttps://folks.pillpack.com/wpinhere/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/folks-logo-1.pngApril Kilcrease2017-04-20 09:02:272017-04-24 09:28:43The Adopted Artist With Her Head In The Clouds

Growing up, Evan Peterson never felt he could be himself. Living in small-town California with a homophobic stepfather, Evan kept quiet when he realized he was attracted to boys as well as girls. Confusion and loneliness took its toll, culminating in clinical depression and a suicide attempt.

Now a single parent, Evan is determined not to let history repeat itself with his own family. Of Evan’s four children, three identify as LGBT. Lane, nineteen, is bisexual, while Jamie and Elliot, sixteen and twelve, are transgender. Their younger sister, Grace, is nine. (All names of the children in this piece have been changed at Evan’s request. – Ed.)

It’s a role he might not have expected but one he’s well equipped for. Evan spent the best part of the last two decades becoming more and more involved in the LGBT community, where he routinely speaks out against injustice and bisexual erasure as a writer with Bisexual Books.

Evan Peterson is a writer on LGBT issues, as well as the parent of four kids.

“Finding where we’re marginalized and speaking about it and trying to give us a voice. That’s where I am now: I’m that guy,” he says.

He wasn’t always that guy. Around the age of eleven, Evan realized he was bisexual. The realization confused him: a situation exacerbated because he couldn’t discuss his sexuality with his “openly homophobic” stepfather.

“When I was a teenager I didn’t really trust my parents at all, I wouldn’t share any sort of problems I was ever having. At that time the word bisexual wasn’t a thing, people didn’t talk about that, just, you’re gay or you’re straight. I was really confused throughout my teens, I just considered myself straight and I was confused as to why I was also attracted to guys.”

His inner turmoil and sense of isolation made him deeply unhappy.

“When I was in the closet, I felt confused. I felt like I was drowning and miserable and had no way to come out of it. I self-medicated with alcohol and promiscuity. I attempted suicide – no one ever found out.”

When I was in the closet, I felt confused. I felt like I was drowning and miserable and had no way to come out of it.

Leaving his hometown for a new life on his own in southern California changed everything.

“I was twenty-one, sitting on a beach by myself after dropping everything and moving to the coast. The sun was a pre-dusk buttery yellow, and I found myself admiring the other people around me. For the first time, I felt no guilt or shame. I felt lighter and free. From that day forward I opened myself up and remained true to myself. [My new life] came with its own worries and complications, but it also filled every part of me with peace, with bliss.”

Evan began coming out to friends, and let his family find out through the grapevine. The relief of being open about his identity improved his state of mind. While he still battles depression –he received a formal diagnosis in 2004– knowing who he is has given Evan the resources to tackle his mental health.

“I am a happier person having allowed myself the strength to be myself,” he says

Day-to-day, Evan manages his well being by taking a daily dose of Welbutrin, and by writing, which channels his energy into creativity. He also leans on friends, some of whom are far flung but still keep in close touch.

But even more important to Evan than his own mental health is that of his kids. LGBT youth are three times more likely to suffer from mental health problems than straight and cisgender kids. A third of LGBT youth have also attempted suicide. Harrowing figures like this have made Evan hyper-aware that supporting his kids.

LGBT youth are three times more likely to suffer from mental health problems than straight and cisgender kids.

“I’ve always raised the kids as [an] openly bisexual [parent], and we’ve always had queer friends around. The kids have always known that home is someplace that is safe, so it was easy for all of them to come out when they decided to come out. I think they felt reassured they’d have a supportive home here. They still come to me with problems and that’s a good sign.”

A small but significant part of that support is respecting Jamie and Elliot’s chosen pronouns. Jamie and Elliot prefer “they/them” pronouns, which Evan says some find confusing, or even use as a way to bully or belittle. At home, though, everybody respects Jamie and Elliott’s personal pronoun choice.

It’s important to Evan Peterson that his children be given constant acceptance and support, so they don’t grow up with the same depression issues he did.

Evan also respects his children’s chosen gender identities. Jamie, born female, is treated like Evan’s son. Elliot, meanwhile, doesn’t consider himself to be a boy or a girl. “Elliot’s still twelve so they’re still figuring all these things out. But they’re pretty open about it.”

Outside of his home, though, Evan has less control. Both Elliot and Jamie face a constant onslaught of negativity from schoolmates and extended family members. As a family, it’s something the Petersons work hard to address: by going to therapy, and by openly discussing what’s going on with their mental health..

“We do talk about [mental health], mostly as me checking in on the kids and how they feel their progress is in counseling, or if there are new issues they need help working on. We also discuss the ways we see other people, in reality or in media, treat themselves or others with mental health issues.”

Evan is a strong role model. But away from the safety net of home, there are some problems that are beyond his control.

“Most of Jamie’s friends have been really supportive through the whole transition, accepting Jamie’s name change and using the right pronouns, so that’s been positive. However, Jamie has also been the recipient of all the bullying you could expect to have at a high school when you’re a transgender kid, with other students deliberately misgendering them and name-calling.”

School’s a little easier for Elliot, who goes to an alternative school, where most of the students hail from left-leaning, hippy-type families.

“Elliot dresses mostly like a typical boy, but many of the kids don’t really dress or act like they conform to gender or societal norms anyway, so Elliot fits in no matter how they identify. I’m worried about Elliot going to high school because that will be a stark change for them.”

The family is concerned about the current political climate, which Evan says is swerving far from LGBT rights and acceptance.

“We have a lot of uncertainty about what our future looks like; how much support we’ll have, how many of our rights will still exist or be taken away; there’s a lot of fear about that right now.”

He’s particularly concerned about Jamie, as the current climate could have a direct impact on their physical and mental health. It’s recommended that transgender children start on puberty blockers by around sixteen. Jamie’s hoping to start taking the blockers soon… something that in today’s political climate could stop being supported by insurance companies.

“There’s a lot of excitement, because maybe that will go forward, but also fears: what if we start puberty blockers and then lose that ability [to fund the treatment through insurance] in the next few months?”

The powerlessness over their fate in the face of political change has caused both Jamie and Evan a lot of anxiety.

“As they get older the amount of things you worry about grows and the worries are more severe and more complicated. I long for the days when my biggest worry with Jamie was something like crossing the road, or losing sight of them in the crowd for a few minutes. Not that I miss Jamie being anything other than what Jamie is now, but I miss the more simple worries that you have with the younger kids.”

Navigating this path as a single parent can be difficult and lonely, Evan says. “When there are problems it can feel overwhelming because you don’t have a partner to lean on, to vent to or give you a break. I’m less miserable than I was when I wasn’t a single parent though, so I take the good with the bad.”

But life’s mostly good, he emphasizes. He wouldn’t change who he was, or who his children are for anything. And like any parent, he just wants his children to be happy.

“It’s more important than anything else. Happiness is the most important thing for me. That would tell me that they’re at their best emotionally, they’re content with life – and it’d give me less to worry about.”

At times impenetrable, at times hilarious, almost always infuriatingly impressive: Aesop Rock, the New York-born rapper is known for his dense and complex songs, A 2014 study named his the largest vocabulary in hop-hop, surpassing 85 other major artists, as well as historic writers including Shakespeare.

With seven studio albums under his belt, Aesop released his latest solo effort The Impossible Kid in April last year. The album confronts mental illness, aging, and includes the tour titled track Hey Kirby, an ode to the cat who helps him deal with depression. It’s considered his most ‘accessible’ work to date.

“I’m not trying to be the lyrical miracle anymore,” he says. “I just want to be a better writer.”

In 2002, the documentary Bazooka Tooth, which shares the name of Aesop’s fourth studio album, first gave a glimpse into the rapper’s life. It was also the first time that he opened up about his struggle with mental health to a wider audience.

“Emotionally I’ve seen the bottom of the barrel, just based on some the things that have happened to me,” he said. “I set my standards really high and end up stressing myself out to the point where I can’t do anything… I’ve had problems just operating. I’ve had issues with depression.”

He’s more guarded these days, shying away from interviews that approach his personal life, though his music remains as unflinching as ever.

Looking back through interviews and videos, I can see you’re not necessarily super open about your mental health, though you have a lot of allusions to it in your work. Why is this particular card one you keep close to your chest?

I guess I just try to walk the line. It’s on my mind constantly, so obviously it works its way into the music in some form or fashion–where I can choose to be as cryptic or forthcoming as I want to be. At the same time, I’ve had a life long struggle with a lot of this stuff, and it make me feel like less of a human to not have been able to get it sorted by now. In short–it’s embarrassing. At the same time, what is there to say? I’m not asked that often about it, and the reality of the answers about those kinds of questions can go on for years. There’s no easy, quick answer, and it’s never fun to talk about. Even having people approach and thank me for being somewhat open about some of it–I mean, it’s nice, but ultimately it doesn’t solve my own issues. I wouldn’t even really know how to describe to people what goes on upstairs for me, so often times it’s easier to steer around it.

‘Kirby’ was one of the earlier songs you wrote for The Impossible Kid, the track that helped “break the ice.” As an “MD recommended sense of purpose,” how does having this cat around affect your life and wellbeing?

I think she just gave me some sense of purpose day to day. She needs me to survive, and it feels good to be needed, even though she doesn’t really have a choice. Taking care of something at least gives you a mission for the day, so if all else fails, I still kept this other living creature alive, and maybe that’s worth something.

After ‘Kirby’ and ‘Rings’, ‘Shrunk’, which deals with therapy, is probably my favorite track on The Impossible Kid. I think because I feel like you’re really just trying to have fun with a topic that’s not fun at all. Is the way you feel at therapy akin to the way you feel when fans or critics pull apart your lyrics to look for the deeper meaning?

Not necessarily. I learned very early that nobody will ever interpret these songs in the way that they were intended, at least not 100%. That’s something you just come to terms with. The relationship I have with my music is mine only. Therapy is it’s own monster. Some love it, some hate it; I’ve been to more than I can count starting very early in my life. It’s such a crap shoot. I guess you walk in expecting someone with wisdom and answers. Really it’s just a person who took some classes and read some books. They can certainly hit you with a nugget of information here and there, but it’s basically a paid set of ears. The entire concept is odd, and it’s pretty easy to find the stuff off-putting. Obviously it’s all about finding the right person, but that can take years. Then you have to see if you can afford it, or how often your insurance will allow you to go, etc etc. There’s so many roadblocks. Not to mention, when it’s time find someone new, for whatever reason, you then have to go back in and start from square one… again. The entire process is daunting and difficult and occasionally just humorous.

I learned very early that nobody will ever interpret these songs in the way that they were intended, at least not 100%.

You’ve said that ‘the impossible kid’ is you, and that that’s something to do with beating yourself up for “struggling to be happy.” Do you think writing the album has helped you come to grips with that?

I was aware of it before writing the album, it’s really been stuff I’ve been aware of for so long I can’t even tell you. The album just kinda came out how it did. It wasn’t supposed to be some foray into mental health or anything, but a couple things of that nature were swirling around at the time and made it into the narrative. I wouldn’t say there’s anything on there that I wasn’t already aware of, and I don’t know it’s the type of stuff I’ll ever come-to-grips with. It’s everyday.

You’ve said you “avoid social experiences at all costs,” and even the more pointed “fuck the conversation.” How does that marry up with being a public figure, going on tour and using social media?

Social media is pretty difficult at times. I use it to promote my music and occasionally just let people know I’m out here and alive, working, etc. I guess it’s essentially part of my job. I’ve never done Facebook and would probably hop off Twitter and Instagram if I thought I could maintain my work without it. I already don’t follow anyone on Twitter because I just find it all depressing. I use Instagram to look at artwork and skateboarding, nothing really music related. Tour life is something that took me years to get used to, or put a system in place that allows it to happen. I quit my last day job in 2001 and had my first-ever national tour set to rollout about a week after. I ended up sorta being overwhelmed in the 11th hour, and I skipped out on the whole thing. That’s my starting point. Nowadays I can make it work, I keep my tour party small, and I can power through it. I like to shake hands and say thank you to everyone after the show, because I’m truly grateful that I am allowed this job and that people follow my music, but even with that stuff, I sorta have to psyche myself up to go and do it. Maybe since it’s a couple hundred very quick interactions with almost no depth, I can just close my eyes and walk forward. I don’t have to get close to anyone in those circumstances. It just a big explosion of surface-level interaction.

I watched the Bazooka Tooth documentary, which is 15 years old now. Do you relate much to it, to the person you were then? You’ve talked a bit about what turning 40 has meant for you. Do you think your work has the same identity and purpose?

I haven’t watched that in a long time. I’m sure I’d relate on some level. I’ve actually always found it extremely difficult to see what my work even looks like from the outside looking in. I don’t know how it comes off, or where people place it in the musical landscape. My life is very different than it was 15 years ago, and there are elements of my purpose that evolve and adapt, but some of the foundation is there. I like to put words together. I like to piece sounds together. I’ve gone through periods where the music was all about the crew experience, being around people, collaborating and rapping with others. These days it’s a much more introverted endeavor. I guess maybe that’s how it was too in the very beginning, when you’re just writing alone in your bedroom with no expectations that anyone will even hear the stuff. Then it turned into a social endeavor, a way to meet others into the same craft. Now I’m back at square one, just seeing what I can do, and attempting to block out the idea that one day these songs may actually get heard.

Do you think there’s much truth or value in the concept of the tortured artist: that people who face tragedy or mental illness make better art or tell better stories?

I think that’s probably true on some level and bullshit on some level. That’s actually a tough one to answer. Perhaps feeling pain on any level breeds the kinda introversion that leads to spending a lot of time alone making shit. But you’d also think that there’s gotta be a way to just be creative without the baggage. Yeah. I really don’t know. Most of the musicians I like are insane, so there’s that.

For me, one of my favorite lines of yours ever is in ‘Homemade Mummy’; “Take the brain out/leave the heart in.” Do you have favorite lines you carry round with you, that you’re particularly proud of or feel meaningful? What are they?

Sure I guess, it’s hard to kinda think of them off the cuff, and I really only have the most recent stuff logged in my memory. I like “even his prize horse rides a wolf into battle”, from ‘Tuff‘. I kinda like some of the 3rd verse of Shrunk that you mentioned. I always liked “armchair hater, I wouldn’t piss on your coffin, but when I see your picture I draw dicks on it.” I guess I like the ones that summon up some real imagery, lines that make a picture in your head. I’d have to listen to the songs to really pull more.

The Hey Kirby tour’s over now. What’s next for you?

I have a few collaborative projects in the works, but it’s probably a bit early to announce any of them. Beyond that I’ll be finishing up original music for the feature Infinity Baby right when I get home. Other than that I just stay working. I never really know what project my days work will go towards, I just chip away and see if I can come up with something cool, a line, a beat, whatever. Just stay busy.

Nestled in her two-bedroom walk-up located just outside of Boston, Massachusetts, Leah Miriam Cooper is prone to staying awake through crisp New England nights. Alone in her living room, Leah uses her personal experiences to forge connections with the outside world through her art. “I know this sounds hokey,” she says, “but my art is my home.”

Leah is a freelance designer, an imager, and a photographer. “I’ve always been creative,” the 27-year-old native of North Kingstown, Rhode Island explains. “When I was five or six, I filled out one of those books that asked what you wanted to be when you grow up. I wrote ‘artist’ and it’s been that way ever since.”

Photo: Leah Miriam Cooper

Leah navigates life’s changes with her camera in hand. “Since I work in photography, I am always shooting,” the artist explains. “I love the accessibility of digital photography.” Digital also makes sense on a practical level. “The work I do often needs to be in color, but I don’t always have access to color dark rooms.”

Unlike other artists who seek studio space, Leah creates art in her home, especially when depressive episodes strike. For her latest project, Leah secured a point and shoot camera to the ceiling of her living room with a handful of barrettes and hair-ties. Over the course of four months, the camera documented Leah’s life within the scope of her living room. From there, Leah is compiling the images into a flip-book.

On her recent project, Leah notes that it is very much still an experiment. “I realized that time lapse work tends to be a time-based form of media and felt that this was the answer for this project,” she explains. “It allows my project to exist as time-based as well as in print, combining the best of two worlds. It’s still an experiment- but it’s important to experiment.”

Thematically, the combination of still images and a flip-book speaks to what is depicted in the photographs. The still images remind viewers of how often we feel stuck in time and unable to escape our space, while viewing them in a flip-book module reinforces the rapid passage of time, and the subsequent blur effect we so often feel when looking back at transitional periods of our lives.

“In my newest series, I felt stuck and isolated and really wanted to show that,” Leah explains. “I felt that staying in the apartment on my computer was somewhat universal, that post grad life often leads to a career limbo where you’re stuck. Of course, what I was going through was heightened by my illness, but I’m hoping others relate to the work.”

“I’m bipolar,” Leah says. “I am generally open about my illness with the world. I believe that part of kicking the stigma is not treating it like it should be shameful.”

I believe that part of kicking the stigma is not treating [depression] like it should be shameful.

Leah, like roughly five million other Americans, lives with bipolar disorder, a chronic mental illness that is often stigmatized and stereotyped in the media. For most people, bipolar disorder is categorized by experiencing periods of mania and depression that can range in time from days to months. Bipolar disorder is often characterized by severe shifts in mood, activity level, and energy, though for many patients with bipolar, symptoms vary in relation to factors outside of chemical imbalance, such as stress, relationships, and even the seasons.

Leah is open about her mental illness in both her professional and personal life, but being transparent about an often misunderstood illness isn’t always easy. “I feel like people think that if I’m medicated, go to therapy, and am mildly successful, then the illness is magically cured,” she says.

Photo: Leah Miriam Cooper

Unfortunately, treating chronic mental health issues is not so simple. Leah resists societal pressure to stay silent about life with a mental illness, and asks for help when she needs it.“Lately I talk it out with people and remind them that I will have bad days and still need support,” she says.

Though Leah is a solo artist, she is happy to have support from those who know her best. “My roommate is one of my main supports,” she explains. “We met in grad school and since he’s an artist he’s been able to give me emotional friend support and art support. I’d say that I turn to him whenever I need help making artistic choices.”

For Leah, the depressive episodes and phases of mania that come with bipolar do not stall her art. Instead, Leah copes with the highs and lows of her illness —and the tumultuous nature of life in general— by generating art in ways that reflect her life.

Leah, seen from eye-level.

“I’ve always been very interested in incorporating my own domestic space within my work,” she explains. “I started with my bedroom at my parents house in undergrad. Then my grad school apartment in Baltimore was the center of any work I was creating.”

Now, Leah’s living room is the hub of her work. “I originally thought of doing this project in my bedroom,” she says, “but realized it would be more interesting to take photos in a shared space, especially since I spent more of my time in the living room.”

Leah’s recent work engages notions of the uncanny into everyday life. A small living room, a coffee table, and the people who come in and out of her home. “I’m sort of fascinated by the complications of daily life that we often overlook,” she says. “I turned to this project when I was experiencing a depressive episode after finishing grad school.”

“I’m sort of fascinated by the complications of daily life that we often overlook…”

“I turned to more of a documentary style of photography after focusing on constructed images for the majority of my career. I felt that making images in a new way as well as creating a portrait of an extremely hard time for me would help.”

Living with bipolar disorder has an impact on the themes Leah explores in her art, as well as the practical side of working. “When I’m depressed, I’m much more likely to make work at night, whether that’s editing, coming up with ideas, anything. I tend to mess up my sleeping when I’m depressed and sleep all day,” Leah admits. “I stay up all night and become hypomanic.”

Leah’s moods and energy levels eventually shift, as does her approach to her current project. “When I’m feeling ok, work takes place during the day and is a lot less manic. My actions need to be more thought out and the series itself becomes more concept based.”

Photo: Leah Miriam Cooper

As an artist, Leah creates her own boundaries about where her work ends and she begins. “I try my best to create work no matter my emotional state, but I do give myself art vacations,” she explains. “I tend to need to reload, especially after a large project.” Self-care is important for any artist when it comes to preventing burn-out, but treating one’s self with forgiveness and recognizing limits is especially prudent when living with a chronic illness.

“My creativity is always around, but a little harder to harness when I’m depressed,” Leah explains. “If I’m feeling a block when I’m depressed I spend a ton of time at museums and galleries til I’m inspired again. I try to stay motivated no matter what.”

Leah’s work largely involves self-portraiture and strong investigations of the self in relation to the world around her. After a traumatic event in the Spring of 2011, Leah became both photographer and subject to document her process of healing and recovery.

Leah’s earlier work dealing with her depressive episodes was a lot more aggressive.

“When I was still unpacking what happened to me, I did a lot of skin pulling images—self portraits where I pulled the flesh on my face or my body,” Leah explains. “At the time I didn’t notice how violent they were, but looking back they’re very aggressive.” For Leah, this trauma manifested in her work, and she transitioned from creating art for aesthetic purposes to creating art that is rich in emotion and raw imagery.

Now, Leah describes herself as creative, empathetic, and driven. Though she works through her depressive episodes, Leah also recognizes when she needs to step back from her work. “Working on art always helps me feel productive, which makes me feel better overall. Though, I have taken time off from art to work on myself from time to time. I try to be very self-forgiving when in a rough spot.”

Leah’s work has caught the attention of international reviewers and chic showrooms in New York City alike. Her master’s thesis, titled Projections, too involved domestic settings, as Leah scanned family photos into 35-millimeter slides before projecting them onto her apartment walls. These manipulated images give the sense that her grandparents, long deceased at the time, were in her bedroom or at the dinner table, for instance. As a whole, Leah’s work is at once tender and unsettling, urging viewers to voyeur into her life before taking a step back and investigating their own.

Photo: Leah Miriam Cooper

In spite of much success with her art, Leah admits that she struggles with imposter’s syndrome. “I’ve always been geared towards creativity,” Leah explains. “But I didn’t feel like I earned the right to call myself an artist until I had my work accepted into a show.” But for Leah, art is not about acclaim and attention from critics; it’s about expression, identity, and forging connections.

Elyn R. Saks was just a teenager when she started believing her thoughts could kill other people. But with treatment, her schizophrenia didn't stop her from living a happy, intellectually-fulfilling life.

One morning, when Elyn R. Saks was in high school, she suddenly decided to leave class and head home. During the three-mile walk, the world around her started “becoming very intense,” and she began to think that the houses were sending her messages: Look closely. You are special. You are especially bad. Look closely and ye shall find. There are many things you must see. See. See.

This was Saks’ first psychotic episode. Her mind quieted for a while and, after high school, she became class valedictorian at Vanderbilt University and received the Marshall scholarship to study philosophy at Oxford. While there, the 21-year-old Saks experienced a complete schizophrenic break. This time around her dark fantasies took a frightening, suicidal cast. She told a doctor that maybe she should douse herself with gasoline and set herself on fire. “That might be best, because I am bad and deserve to suffer.” This episode led to one of two lengthy hospital stays in England. When she completed her master’s degree 1981, she had lost two years to her illness.

At one point, Saks was told that she “would live in a board and care facility and work at a menial job at best.” Today, she is a recipient of the MacArthur “genius” grant, a law professor at the University of Southern California, and a mental health policy expert. Partly inspired by her own experience of being forcibly hospitalized, which she vividly describes in her 2007 memoir,The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness, she often advocates for greater patient rights and autonomy.

In Saks’ 2012 TED Talk, she closes by saying that if there were a magic pill that would instantly cure her, she would take it in an instant, but she doesn’t regret the life she could have had nor does she want pity. Says Saks, “… the humanity we all share is more important than the mental illness we may not. What those of us who suffer with mental illness want is what everybody wants: in the words of Sigmund Freud, ‘to work and to love.’”

The humanity we all share is more important than the mental illness we may not.

Here Saks discusses the realities of dealing with schizophrenia, the importance of her husband and friends, and the and the biggest misconceptions about mental illness.

Would you mind describing one of your more powerful psychotic episodes?

It was November, first semester of my first year at Yale law school, and I started slipping. I walked outside on the roof of the Yale law school library, which was flat and safe. Some friends came and I started gesticulating, dancing around, and singing, “Come to the Florida sunshine bush, where there are lemons, where they make demons.” My friends asked if I was on drugs. I said, “No. No drugs at all.”

I had delusional beliefs that I could kill people with my thoughts. And my speech was incoherent. For example, I said “Are you having the same experience I am of words jumping around in our legal cases? Our cases have been infiltrated. We’ve gotta case the joint. I don’t believe in joints, but they do hold your body together.” These are called “loose associations,” where words are loosely associated, but don’t make sense together.

Eventually, we all went home. The next morning, I went to see my professor to ask for an extension and I started behaving the same way. He took me to the Emergency Room, where I was restrained for the first time. It was extremely toxic and traumatic. From there, I ended up hospitalized for five months. That happened around ’82, ’83. I haven’t been in a hospital since then. That is sort of my proudest accomplishment, which is a weird thing to say. You wouldn’t say you were proud of not relapsing from cancer, but I think there are small choices people can make that will lead to better or worse outcomes. Thank God my analysts have all been willing to sit with a certain amount of anxiety about my well being for the sake of respecting my wish not to be hospitalized.

What symptoms of schizophrenia do you still experience?

My husband likes to say that psychosis is not an on-and-off switch but a dimmer. At one end, I’ll have a crazy idea, like I’ll think I’ve killed people with my thoughts, and I’ll recognize it immediately: “Oh, Elyn, that’s just your illness acting up. Pay it no mind.” And then further along the spectrum, say we have house guests. I love my friends but I find it hard to be around people a lot. I may have three or four days when I’m in and out of psychosis. At the far end, I’m crouching in a corner shaking, scared out of my wits. That hasn’t happened in a good decade. I still have some transient symptoms, but nothing really severe or really long lasting.

It’s sort of silly to quantify but, when I was in England, I would say like 70-80 percent of my waking thoughts were psychotic. At Yale, in New Haven, I would say 30 percent. Now we’re talking about three to four percent.

Psychosis is not an on-and-off switch but a dimmer.

How do your husband and friends help monitor your illness?

My husband and my closest friend Steve serve as another set of eyes if I start slipping. I’m very happy to have them involved. Occasionally, one of them will want to call my doctor and I say, “If you want to, that’s fine.” One time Steve called my doctor and said, “Elyn seems really unwell. She’s talking about going to China in advance of your trip to clear out of all the bad people.” To which my doctor responded, “How very considerate of her.”

Do you think having these strong social connections is a big part of dealing with schizophrenia? I imagine it’s very difficult for some people with the illness to maintain those connections.

I’ve been very fortunate. Some of the so-called “negative” symptoms of schizophrenia [meaning behaviors that are absent or diminished compared to people without schizophrenia – ed.] are a lack of relationships, a hard time working, and withdrawal. I’ve been spared those negative symptoms. Having people in my life makes my life much better and gives it meaning and depth. I sometimes have students with the illness. We’ll have lunch and they’ll ask me, “How do you manage to keep your friends? I haven’t been able to.” I don’t really know what to say except that if you are a good friend to people, they’ll be good friends back.

What are some of the biggest misconceptions people have about schizophrenia and those who suffer from it?

First is that we’re violent. In fact, people with mental illness—that’s not just schizophrenia but everything—commit only around two to three percent of violent crime. We’re much likelier to be victimized than be victimizers. I think we need to educate the public that mental illness doesn’t mean dangerousness. The more flamboyant crimes usually do involve mental illness, but those are so rare.

The second thing is that people cannot live independently, cannot work, cannot have relationships, cannot get married, cannot have kids. It’s just not true. A lot of us can do those things.

I think we need to educate the public that mental illness doesn’t mean dangerousness.

I’ve read that, when it comes to treatment, you’re against force being used, for example: to restrain someone during an episode, or to force them to make a decision they can’t choose to make. How should we help someone is who is having a psychotic episode get treatment?

I’m not totally anti-force. I think there are cases were force is needed. For example, if someone’s imminently dangerous, or if they cannot understand their situation and make a competent choice. If my loved one said, “This anti-psychotic medication has really helped me in the past, but I cannot take it now because I’ve been told it will cause a nuclear explosion,” I would want to step in and say, “Give her the meds.”

I’d also like to say that I think force is not good. It causes humiliation and shame. And it’s a very unstable solution because once you stop administering the force the person has no incentive to go back. We should use it as little as possible. What I propose is studying ways to get people to want treatment, so we don’t have to use force. I think that should be a big research focus of psychiatrists and psychologists.

What are some ways to help people want to get treatment?

Well, I want to do a study that has three arms. One will be someone who’s gotten on medication right away and stayed on it. The other extreme would be someone who has resisted medication for 10 years, tried to get off every couple of months, or stayed off for a year or two. In the middle are people who kind of tip. These people start off noncompliant and not wanting medication, and then something happens that makes them want it. I think by studying those three groups, we can learn some of the things that make people tip. Then we can help other people tip sooner and more completely.

Why do people refuse anti-psychotic medication?

I think people refuse meds for all sorts of reasons. One, they don’t like the side effects. But to me, if the choice is between gaining some weight and being psychotic, I’m going to take gaining weight. I gained about 20 pounds. If I gained 100 pounds, I might feel differently. Second, they feel better and don’t think they need it anymore, similar to the way people stop antibiotics before they’re supposed to. Third, they’re in denial that they have an illness.

To me, the most powerful reason [to refuse anti-psychotic medication] is the narcissistic injury of having a mental illness and needing medication. That’s the thing that most affected me. It’s just very painful. I wanted to get off medication to prove that I really wasn’t mentally ill, that it was all some big mistake. Ironically, once I got on the medication consistently and accepted the illness, it became much less front and center. I’ve found that the more I embrace it, the less it defines me.

I’ve found that the more I embrace [my condition], the less it defines me.

There are ways you can encourage people to take meds. Try to get a sense of their needs, wants, and values, and how meds fit into that. For example, I think you can tell people, “Whether or not you’re ill, this med will help you with the restlessness you’re complaining of or the sleeplessness.” There’s a really good book by Xavier Amador called I’m Not Sick, I Don’t Need Help! that walks families through trying to get their loved ones to agree to meds.

What helped you decide to start taking medication?

I always took it, but I was trying to get off of it for about 10 years. Actually, my doctor kind of coerced me. He said, “Look getting off medication keeps you going in and out of episodes. You want to get on with your life. If you want to keep seeing me, you have to take your meds.” Once I got on the meds consistently, my life got much better. I wouldn’t think about going off of them now, because I just have a much better life than when I was going on and off.

What meds are you currently on?

I’m on Prozac for anxiety and Clozapine for schizophrenia.

How has psychoanalysis helped you cope with schizophrenia?

Photo courtesy of the USC Gould School of Law

First, stress is bad for any illness, particularly mental illness. Analysis can help you identify and either avoid or manage your stressors. Second, it fortifies an observing ego, so you can stand back and view what’s going on in your mind and assess it and understand it. Third, it’s a safe place to bring your crazy, violent, and chaotic thoughts, sort of like a steam valve. If you say [these thoughts] in therapy, you don’t have to say them in your outside world. Also, therapy can involve insights. I remember once I was saying violent things and my doctor said, “Elyn I think you’re saying violent things because you’re scared. The violence is your defense against the fear.” That helped make it go away.

Then finally, having a kind, smart, and well-meaning person who accepts you not only for the good but also the bad and ugly is very empowering and helpful. Another way to think about it is that people with schizophrenia have relationship and work issues just like everybody else, and therapy can help with those issues. In the field today, we think not so much in terms of reduction or remission of symptoms, but quality of life. It’s for the person herself to say what that is for her. Therapy can help achieve that.

Do you think that with the right help many other people with schizophrenia could lead similarly high-functioning lives?

I’m doing a study on high-functioning people with schizophrenia with some folks at UCLA and USC. People sometimes say I’m unique, but in fact we fairly quickly got 20 subjects—two MDs, two JDs, Ph.D. candidates, full-time teachers, a CEO of a not-for-profit organization. There are people out there like me. It’s just so stigmatized that they don’t come forward.

There are people out there like me. It’s just so stigmatized that they don’t come forward.

I asked psychiatrist and schizophrenia expert Stephen Marder what percentage of people with schizophrenia he thought were high functioning in our sense, which would be professional, managerial, technical, etc. He said, “I don’t know, Elyn. But the real question is how many could be if we provided proper resources.” I thought that was the right answer. I think it’s a mistake to tell people, to lower their expectations. I think many people can live up to their premorbid potential with enough help and enough support. And it does them a really big disservice to basically tell them to stop trying.

Folks is an online magazine dedicated to telling the stories of remarkable people who refuse to be defined by their health issues. By sharing the experiences of these individuals, we hope to change people’s notions about what it means to be ‘normal’.

Editorially independent, Folks is sponsored and published by PillPack. Part of our mission at PillPack is to create healthcare experiences that empower people. We don’t believe people are defined by their conditions. We pay our contributors, and we don’t sell advertising.